LLM Inevitabilism

The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument.

This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was inevitable.

The IT industry is full of pride and arrogance. We deny the power of AI and LLMs. I think that's fair, I welcome the pushback. But the real word the IT crowd needs to learn is "denialism" - if you still don't see how LLMs is changing our entire industry, you haven't been paying attention.

Edit: Lots of denialists using false dichotomy arguments that my opinion is invalid because I'm not producing examples and proof. I guess I'll just leave this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems and go full AGI next year.

If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that. But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents (feel free to jump in here), I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal. Personally, I would expect to see an explosion of this even if the hype is taken extremely conservatively. But I can't even track down a few solid examples. So far my searching only reveals one-off pull requests that had to be laboriously massaged into acceptability.

One part of the code generation tools is that they devalue code at the same time as produce low quality code (without a lot of human intervention.)

So a project that mostly is maintained by people who care about their problem/code (OSS) would be weird to be "primarily maintained by AI" in a group setting in this stage of the game.

Exactly the problem. It doesn't need to be good enough to work unsupervised in order to gain real adoption. It just needs to be a performance or productivity boost while supervised. It just needs to be able to take an AI-friendly FOSS dev (there are many), and speed them along their way. If we don't have even that, then where is the value (to this use case) that everyone claims it has? How is this going to shake the foundations of the IT industry?

Because convincing the owners of the house they have a shaky foundation and you have a cheap fix matters more than the actual integrity and the fix.

There's no question that the predictions around LLMs are shaking up the industry - see mass layoffs and offers for 8 figures to individual contributors. The question is will it materially change things for the better? no idea.